Companies have started to replace PCs they’d put off updating during the recession, and that cycle will take off in the third and fourth quarters as enterprises spend on new hardware while trying to reduce support and maintenance costs, Michael Dell said on Thursday. Client PC purchases took a backseat as enterprises froze IT budgets during the recession, leaving companies with aging hardware and outdated software, the Dell CEO said during the company’s analyst conference in Austin, Texas, which was also webcast.

DRAM makers settle up for price fixing scheme

Thirty-three states, including California, have reached a US$173 million settlement with six DRAM makers alleged to have fixed prices for their products between 1998 and 2002. California and the other states — including Massachusetts, Florida, New York and Pennsylvania — filed a class-action lawsuit against the DRAM makers in July 2006 alleging that a price-fixing scheme hurt consumers, state agencies, universities and other groups. The DRAM manufacturers named in the lawsuit are U.S. companies Micron Technology and NEC Electronics America, as well as Infineon Technologies from Germany, Hynix Semiconductor from South Korea, Elpida Memory from Japan, Mosel Vitelic from Taiwan and their American subsidiaries.

Twitter pays heed to security complaints

Social-networking giant Twitter has agreed to settle a complaint from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission alleging that the company deceived users and put their privacy at risk by failing to take appropriate security safeguards. Hackers were able, on two occasions in early 2009, to gain access to Twitter messages, called tweets, that users had designated as private, and they were able to send out phony tweets pretending to be from U.S. President Barack Obama, Fox News and other organizations, the FTC said.

Google kills two Android apps

Google disclosed in a blog post on Thursday that it remotely removed two applications from Android phones that ran contrary to the terms of the Android Market. A security researcher built and offered the free applications “for research purposes,” wrote Rich Cannings, Android security lead, in the blog post. The application descriptions misrepresented their purpose in order to encourage downloads. The apps weren’t used maliciously and didn’t have permission to access private data.